Then, before they put them in the carts, business partners Ronald Martinez and Wendy Reyes count how many each man has and note the numbers in their daily log. La Michoacana Fresca's front ice cream parlor isn't open yet, but in the back room, the ice cream men carefully stack the small, cold packages of ice cream in baskets for counting. The carts belong to the ice cream shop, but each man uses the same one every day. There are three of them, and they're all wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, skin tanned from working out in the sun.Īs they pull the carts out of a storage area, the attached bells jangle in the effort. The ice cream men meet at the back of the East Naples store at about 10 a.m. He buys two, one-liter Gatorades when he heads out for his morning loop, and by midday, he usually needs two more. His current route is about five miles and he does it twice a day: Meandering up and down dead-end drives and around development circles. It lets people know the ice cream man is coming.Įvery week for the last year, Jiménez, 43, has walked the streets around the ice cream shop on Radio Road. The jingly-jangly clanging travels at least a block ? and it's the most important part of his set up, he says. Two metal bells dangle from the handlebars and he taps them with his thumbs, pausing only as he eases over speed bumps. It might be the beginning of October, but it still feels like the dead of summer. When you step into the sun your cheeks flush and your skin dampens. The rectangular, fiberglass cart rumbles along the pavement on two, fat wheels. It's a Friday afternoon, and Jiménez walks steadily down a dead-end residential street, leaning his 5-foot-4-inch frame into the cart's handlebars as he pushes. Especially when you consider that he does all that walking while pushing a cart the size of a wheelbarrow filled with a ice cream. Most people wouldn't consider walking 10 miles in the hot sun a day of rest.īut Marcos Jiménez isn't most people.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |